1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to the field of presentation of electronic mail. More specifically, the present invention provides an improved access to e-mail display by using threading to organize messages in a user's mailbox.
2. Description of the Related Art
As the amount of e-mail people receive continues to rise almost geometrically, there is an increased need for a way in which to manage that e-mail. When a user receives dozens or even hundreds of e-mails in a single day, the messages become difficult to usefully organize and contextualize. Add to that the occasional vacation, leaving no access to e-mail, and imagine the horror waiting for the user upon his return to find several hundred unread e-mails.
In an effort to help users get a handle on displaying their e-mails, some solutions have already been tried. The most simple example allows a user's inbox to be sorted by one or more various criteria. For example, a user can sort his inbox by message sender, by subject, by date, by file size, or by conversation. Sorting by message sender is helpful because it allows all messages from a single sender to be grouped together in the inbox view. This approach ignores the fact that individual e-mail messages are often part of a chain of messages from different users, forming a discussion. The user therefore loses the context of the conversation. That is, one can see only one side of the conversation. If someone else, including the mailbox user himself has responded to the sender in between two of the sender's messages, that response is lost. Thus, sorting messages merely by message sender is not an adequate solution to the problem of organizing one's inbox. Similarly, organizing messages by received date or by sent date is useful in that it allows messages to be read in the order in which they were received or sent, but does not really give the mailbox owner any context, especially since the user may be participating in multiple conversations at once via e-mail, and there is no grouping of the individual conversations. This problem is addressed partially by the ability to group messages by “conversation”, offered by Outlook, a product of Microsoft Corporation of Redmond, Wash. Outlook simply lists messages that are related to a single conversation, even if any message sender subsequently changes the subject line of the message in response to a previous message in that conversation. While this partially addresses the problem, the grouping adds no information about the group itself—it merely organizes the messages to be together in a list in the user's view of the inbox. In addition, all messages become conversations, even where there is only a single message in the conversation. This only adds extra overhead to the already encumbered inbox view. Thus, there is still room for refinement.
In view of the foregoing, a need therefore exists for a way to manage a user's inbox that organizes e-mails in such a way as to provide a thread of messages, including contextual information about the contents of each thread.